The present invention relates to telephone systems and more specifically to telephone answering machines and to telephone systems having "call conferencing" features.
Telephone systems providing localized exchange functions, such as private branch exchange and Centrex systems frequently provide call conferencing features. In accordance with these features, users of telephones within the systems may, among other things, execute station-to-station call transfers whereby incoming telephone calls can be transferred to other telephones. However, if a conventional telephone answering machine is employed to answer incoming calls to a telephone within such a system, no mechanism has heretofore existed for taking advantage of the call conferencing station-to-station call transfer capability provided by the system. Consequently, in such cases, the calling party has not been able to initiate a transfer to another telephone. The calling party must hang up and redial in order to reach another telephone even though this other telephone may be within the same local system as the telephone originally dialed.
It is, therefore, an object of the present invention to provide a telephone answering machine which additionally allows a calling party to take advantage of the station-to-station call transfer capability provided by many telephone systems.
It is another object of the present invention to provide a telephone answering machine which automatically executes call transferring procedures in response to prompts and data supplied by a calling party in the form of digit tones.
It is a further object of the present invention to provide a telephone answering machine adapted for allowing calling parties to make station-to-station call transfers which is simple to use, economical to construct and efficient in operation.